How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Scientists Tamed AIDS By David France Signal 640 pp; $34.95

David France is one of the small group of journalists that get widespread attention for book-length investigative stories. Though he has so far failed to break into the top tier occupied by writers such as Jon Krakauer (Into The Wild) or Jane Meyer (Dark Money), if anything will do it, it will be his latest, How to Survive a Plague.

France’s previous books explore the difficult experiences of gay Americans. Our Fathers, published in 2004, built on the Boston Globe’s expose of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (the movie Spotlight, based on the Globe’s reporting, won the Oscar for best picture in 2016). The Confession (2006) was co-authored with New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who came out as gay in 2004 when a former lover threatened to expose him. Though both books received positive reviews and decent sales, France’s real success came with his 2012 documentary film How to Survive a Plague, to which this book is a companion. The documentary won a Peabody Award and a Directors Guild Award, and was nominated for an Oscar and two Emmys.

Signal

Somewhere between the moral-panic inducing New York Times article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” and the death of the author’s partner from AIDS-related pneumonia, the strength of David France’s latest book becomes clear: This is not a traditional history of AIDS. It is more of a memoir, all raw emotion and lingering rage. France’s personal history is too deeply intertwined with the history of AIDS activism for an antiseptic analysis.

The book’s subtitle, “The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS,” asserts a totality of sorts, an idea that this is the book that will explain how the fight against AIDS was won, but France has produced a history that is less than complete. This book focuses on the United States and the mostly white gay activists who fought for a cure. The many other groups who were struck by AIDS, such as intravenous drug users and Haitian people, are not a focus. Nor are the millions who died in Sub-Saharan Africa before an effective drug was found in 1996 – and continue to die in huge numbers today.

The best parts of How to Survive a Plague are the ones France experienced himself. He was there for many of the key moments in the fight to find a cure for AIDS in the United States, as a reporter for the New York Native, one of the only publications to cover the disease in its early days.

France chronicles medical breakthroughs, key protests and over 650,000 deaths. He describes reading the headline, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” in 1981 and originally dismissing it as part of the newspaper industry’s ubiquitous homophobia – not realizing the article was referring to what would become known as AIDS, a disease that would kill so many people he knew and loved.

France describes attending a funeral for a friend. Then another. Then another. It is clear the experiences still sit with him. At the end of the book, while chronicling the death of a man, Spencer Cox, who stopped taking the drugs that might have saved him, France writes: “What was clear was that living had proved more than he could handle. As was said about the great Holocaust writer Primo Levi after he plunged to his death, Spencer Cox had never left the camps. Maybe none of us did.”

In an interview with the National Post, France argued that many of the modern-day victories of the LGBT+ movement – employment non-discrimination, legalization of same sex marriage – were built on the backs of AIDS activists: the people who wrapped Sen. Jesse Helms’s house in a condom, interrupted mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a giant condom and scattered the ashes of dead AIDS activists on the White House lawn.

He described moving to New York just before AIDS became widespread and going right to the gay ghetto: “After the beginning of the modern movement, we developed these pockets of gay people, gay ghettos. Those ghettos were really solid defensible places where you were less likely to be killed and we fortified those neighbourhoods. And when I moved to New York I moved to the gay ghetto, that’s what you did.”

France sees parallels between the silence from Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as thousands of Americans died of AIDS, and Donald Trump’s proposals to ban Muslims and deport Hispanics. He points to the wins activists were able to gain despite the reluctance of political leaders to hear them, arguing that it was easier for the public to ignore the crisis because ignorance and bigotry towards gay people was so widespread. (A Gallup poll taken in 1986 found that 57 per cent of people thought sex between consenting gay or lesbian adults should be illegal.) France says things have changed though: “We’ve won the hearts and minds struggle, so even if a campaign is waged against us or against the Muslims or against liberalism, I think we’re in a place where we all have a lot of allies to fight back with.”

This book is particularly relevant for Canadian readers as the nation struggles with its own resurgence of AIDS. The HIV infection rate in Saskatchewan is about double the national average and the infection rate on some reserves is on par with certain African countries. So far, Saskatchewan’s deadly outbreak has received minimal press coverage and little government attention. France’s book offers a blueprint on how to change that.